Friday, September 27, 2013

Hormone disruptors rise from the dead : Nature News & Comment

We could learn a few things from the EU on food and agriculture regulation.

"He and his colleague David Cwiertny, an environmental engineer at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, decided to find out whether the breakdown products of endocrine disruptors could be boosting their environmental impact. Their team focused on trenbolone acetate, a synthetic anabolic steroid used as a growth promoter in more than 20 million cattle in the United States each year (this practice is banned in the European Union).

Cattle metabolize the steroid into compounds such as 17α-trenbolone, a potent endocrine disrupter commonly found in agricultural run-off water. In laboratory tests, just a few tens of nanograms of these compounds per litre can skew sex ratios and decrease fertility in fish2, 3. Some manufacturers have argued that these metabolites pose little risk in rivers, however, because sunlight breaks them down rapidly."